"The C.I.A. and the Mafia coordinated activities
because the Mafia wanted a piece of the music business and the C.I.A.
wanted to do away with politics in popular music — so they had an
incentive to join forces."

If the Hippie psychedelic drug extravaganza began with
the C.I.A. (see Acid Dreams by Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain), and the F.B.I.
conducted a snitch operation against Leftists in the Sixties and Seventies
(COINTELPRO), could Rock & Roll have been left alone?

No, we're not buying into the Lyndon LaRouche conspiracy
theory which posits that The Beatles and Grateful Dead were unholy inventions
of the Tavistock Institute in England, designed to clutter and confuse
youthful minds and take them away from Mozart and nuclear fusion.

The following interview with ALEX CONSTANTINE, author
of Psychic Dictatorship In The U.S.A., and Virtual Government: C.I.A.
Mind Control Operations In America, concerns his research for a book named
Operation Chaos. Constantine seems interested in the unholy convergence
of music biz mobsters — who find some figures worth far more dead
than alive — and intelligence agencies anxious to experiment with
mind control on fresh, controllable young brains. And beneath all this
is the right-wing intelligence agencies' fear of a loud and emerging Leftist
movement, a movement particularly situated within Rock & Roll music.

SECONDS: You're working
on a book called Operation Chaos, which concerns the subtext and subrosa
events of Rock & Roll and what goes on in terms of government intelligence
operations and assassinations of individuals in Rock, Blues and Jazz.
Why do you believe the assassinations have come to pass?

CONSTANTINE: There have
been Congressional testimonies from C.I.A. operatives who admitted, without
providing details or names, that they have "driven some of these
musicians to their deaths." They admitted they had performed surveillance,
mail openings, phone taps. The main musicians of the period reported being
followed by the F.B.I. John Lennon went on national television and complained
he couldn't leave the house without being followed by FBI operatives.

So, you have this testimony that they had "driven
some of these musicians to their deaths." Well, what does it mean
that they had driven these musicians to their deaths and exactly who was
it that they had driven to their deaths? It's a small step to say the
C.I.A. actually assassinated some of these musicians. If you begin to
look into some of the details surrounded the deaths of Mama Cass Elliot,
Phil Ochs. Jimi Hendrix — up to the modern period with Michael Hutchence,
whose death was extremely mysterious — you began to ask a lot of
questions about how exactly these people died. In fact, some of them were
driven to their deaths. To give you an example, Phil Ochs developed a
multiple personality. He was a part of a group I called the "Baez
Contras" who surrounded Joan Baez. It's known that Joan was used
in C.I.A. mind control experimentation at a very early age. She was subjected
to trauma-based programming, which is still in use today in the creation
of multiple personalities. If you look at the latest record by Joan Baez,
she thanks her multiple personalities on the back of the record. Then
you have her friend Phil Ochs, who was equally adamant in his opposition
to the U.S. government and covert operations — and he developed
a multiple personality by the name of John Train. It wasn't until ten
years later that the name "John Train" surfaced as a C.I.A.
operative working on Wall Street. As a matter of fact, Lyndon LaRouche
complained about an agent named John Train who supposedly led him to his
present jail sentence. During the 1960s and Seventies, John Train of the
C.I.A. had the job of disrupting the Left, which was the sole purpose
of Operation Chaos. So how was it that Phil Ochs came to have a multiple
personality with the name of an actual C.I.A. agent? We know Phil Ochs
was found hung in 1976 and it was his alternate personality that did the
hanging that actually assassinated the host personality.

The F.B.I. and C.I.A. came together in Operation
Chaos; it was an inter-agency program that drew upon the entire intelligence
apparatus of the U.S. government. As I say, it was the largest covert
project in American history.

SECONDS: Could you provide
more informational support on the idea that Joan Baez was involved?

CONSTANTINE: Yes. She's
admitted in private letters to two organizations for mind control victims
that she had been submitted to trauma-based programming as a child.

SECONDS: What's trauma-based
programming?

CONSTANTINE: The C.I.A.
found they could take a young child, subject that child to extreme trauma,
forcing the child to withdraw within himself. That's called disassociation
and at that stage you can begin to program the child by creating altered
personalities. Often the altered personality lives in the area of the
body that is tortured. So if the child is tortured in the shoulder, for
instance, he may have a multiple personality that lives in the shoulder.

SECONDS: How would a
child he tortured?

CONSTANTINE: With electric
shock.

SECONDS: Joan Baez's
family was —

CONSTANTINE: Her father
was the head of Operations Research at Cornell University, which is known
today as being the home base for all MK-Ultra contracts during the 1950s.

SECONDS: What does "Operations
Research" mean?

CONSTANTINE: I'm not
sure, but that was his title. Cornell was the home of all mind control
experimentation conducted by the C.I.A. It was the also the home of the
Human Ecology Fund, which is well known as the contract base of MK-Ultra.
The C.I.A. handed out contracts to Ivy League universities and behind
the fences of these colleges around the country there were scientists
conducting over one hundred and twenty different sub-projects in the field
of mind control.

SECONDS: So we have Phil
Ochs and Joan Baez —

CONSTANTINE: In a small
circle of Folk singers, what are the odds that two of them would have
multiple personalities? Now Joan Baez reaches the age of seventeen and
hits those coffeehouses with her guitar and begins associating with a
young man named Bob Dylan who, if you recall, has a motorcycle accident
in 1966. This is three months after Joan Baez's brother-in-law had a fatal
motorcycle accident. How was it this came about? Those are questions I
want to ask about these musicians and their tragic lives. In the case
of Phil Ochs, it's easy to understand why he was targeted by Operation
Chaos. He was at the Chicago convention — remember "Pig For
President"? That was his pig. He was one of the organizers of the
Chicago event. His career was on the rise up to the Chicago convention;
then after the convention it went into steep decline. He was blackballed
by the radio stations; he had a difficult time getting record contracts;
his career nose-dived from 1968 until his death.

SECONDS: What other musicians
were assassinated?

CONSTANTINE: There's
a whole slew of musicians who were vocally political and opposed the Central
Intelligence Agency. Joan Baez had gone to Chile and rallied against the
C.I.A. — and the youth movement in general had targeted the Central
Intelligence Agency for its role in the Vietnam War and bringing the United
States into it. You had Fascism openly condemned on campuses; they were
burning Nixon in effigy — this is why Operation Chaos geared up.
To put down the youth movement entailed assassinating political leaders
and musicians who spoke openly against the Nixon regime. The clearest
example I know is Brian Jones. The killer of Brian Jones was a man by
the name of George Thorogood — not the musician — who actually
confessed on his deathbed. This was twenty years after the event, but
there were also witnesses that very night Jones died — three or
four witnesses — who all described the same thing. All of them received
death threats, some were told to leave the country and keep their mouths
shut or they'd be next. They had an incentive to keep quiet until the
death of George Thorogood, at which time they came forward and were interviewed
by a reputable historian by the name of A. E. Hochner, who published the
interviews with the witnesses — and they all corroborate the information
that was provided by George Thorogood. What they described is that Brian
Jones — who was not on drugs that night, although drugs are often
given as the cause of his death — was an expert swimmer but drowned
in his own swimming pool. How did this come about? According to the witnesses,
his head was held underwater first by one man and when he struggled, two
others jumped in the pool and held Brian Jones's head underwater until
he drowned to death. To back up, why was Brian Jones targeted? A C.I.A.
operative arrived in the lives of the Stones. He claimed to be a James
Bond figure and he turned up with a valise full of every drug you can
imagine. At this point the Stones still hadn't done LSD. They woke up
one morning at the home of Keith Richards and here was this character
slipping LSD into their tongues as they were waking up. They didn't know
exactly what was happening but they swallowed the drug and the police
arrived that very afternoon. Keith Richards and Mick Jagger were arrested
and thus began their political problems.

SECONDS: What was this
the name of this C.I.A. operative?

CONSTANTINE: His name
was David Schneiderman and he was The Rolling Stones's LSD supplier —
for one night. When the police arrived, Schneiderman was allowed to leave
the country and he flew back to California. They rounded up Mick Jagger
and Keith Richards but the problem was neither of them had any drugs on
them or on the premises. So they had a difficult time nailing down a conviction
and Jagger and Richards were set free. Who's Schneiderman? According to
Mick Jagger, he was "a sinister American from California" and
[reads] "he had so many passports no one was certain of his origin.
Schneiderman brought to Keith Richards's home a suitcase that contained
every herb and chemical to stab or stroke the mind, along with choice
LSD from San Francisco. Schneiderman had let us believe he was bending
the law all over the world. He was on a James Bond thing, the C.I.A. or
something."

SECONDS: What did Jagger
and Richards say about the death of Brian Jones?

CONSTANTINE: After the
murder, they were outspoken about the fact that it was a murder. Keith
Richards gave an interview in which he talked about this strange group
of workmen spending time at Jones's house. They pretty much took over
the house, got into his bank account and ran Brian Jones's life. Richards
believed it was the same workmen that had killed Brian Jones and he was
absolutely right.

SECONDS: What about Jimi
Hendrix?

CONSTANTINE: He had a
manager named Michael Jeffrey who claimed at the time he had worked for
the intelligence services and he also bragged he had close connections
to Mafia figures. Michael Jeffrey had served in the Middle East and openly
declared he took part in assassinations and kidnappings. According to
my own investigation, Jimi Hendrix was kidnapped at one point by the Mafia
and Michael Jeffrey sent in a crew to free him. Jimi Hendrix wasn't fooled
for a minute. He knew Michael Jeffrey had engineered this kidnapping as
a way of winning Hendrix's loyalty. Hendrix was very aware his money was
being siphoned. If you follow the money, you find the money from the band's
performances and recordings was being siphoned through the Cayman Islands
and ended up in Chase Manhattan Bank. When Hendrix died, there was a lot
of squabbling about the money and to this day it has never been all accounted
for. It's very clear Jeffrey had no interest in Hendrix's music, so why
is it he had come into Hendrix's life? Hendrix depended entirely on Michael
Jeffrey for income; he didn't even have any spending money. Jeffrey pretty
much controlled his entire life and in some ways sabotaged his entire
career. You may remember his famous booking with The Monkees, due to Michael
Jeffrey's finagling. Also. Jeffrey tried time and time again to bring
Hendrix into Mafia circles. Hendrix was aware the money was being siphoned
off and had initiated court action and was in the midst of it when he
died. Others had tried to establish how he died and it's very difficult
because every one of the central witnesses in the case gives a different
story about what happened that night. According to Monica Danneman, the
woman he was cohabiting with at the time, he had two glasses of wine,
took nine sleeping pills, went to sleep and the story is he choked on
his vomit and died. The nine pills are often attributed to the death of
Hendrix — the problem is it was a reasonable dose of a mild sedative.
He had tried two or three of these pills before and they had no effect
on him. He was an insomniac of the highest order and needed some sort
of medical aid to get to sleep, so he took nine capsules out of a bottle
of forty-two, thinking they'd put him to sleep. Mitch Mitchell hired a
private investigator to establish exactly how it was that Hendrix died.
He turned up the coroner's report which indicated Hendrix had drowned.
According to the chief surgeon in the case, who directly contradicted
statements made by Monica Danneman, Hendrix was brought into surgery.
There was indeed vomit in his throat but that was cleared and Hendrix
was still alive. According to the surgery, once his throat was cleared
great vines of red wine came gushing out of Hendrix's stomach. How did
the wine get there? Is this what the coroner meant when he said Hendrix
drowned? Is it possible Hendrix was held down while gallons of wine were
dumped down his throat? This is all inconclusive but we know he did not
choke to death on his vomit that's a myth.

"To put down the youth movement entailed assassinating
political leaders and musicians who spoke openly against the Nixon regime."

SECONDS: What about Danneman?
Was she involved?

CONSTANTINE: Some fans
and friends contend Monica Danneman may have had something to do with
his death, but the fact is she dearly loved Hendrix and spent the rest
of her life painting portraits of him and her own death was mysterious.
Others around Hendrix died in mysterious ways, including Michael Jeffrey,
who died in a plane accident a couple of years later. It's funny how in
assassinations, witnesses and the perpetrators happen to die. This is
a pattern that has been established in C.I.A. assassinations.

SECONDS: Why go after
Jimi Hendrix?

CONSTANTINE: He had declared
openly in teen Rock publications he was in opposition to the Vietnam War.
The Black Panthers had tried to politicize Jimi Hendrix and in order to
allay their aggressiveness, he had stated that the Blank Panthers should
go to Washington, D.C. and hang certain political figures. He advocated
resistance to the Nixon administration and therefore became a political
target.

SECONDS: Weren't there
a lot of people in the music world that advocated a strong response to
Nixon?

CONSTANTINE: Yes, and
the most political didn't survive into the mid-1970s.

SECONDS: We're talking
about these Sixties figures, but were there people before and after them
who also were assassinated?

CONSTANTINE: Yes. You
can go back to the mid-1950s when strange tests begin to occur, especially
of Black Blues musicians. Then you have figures in the mid-1960s like
Bobby Fuller. Bobby Fuller wrote "I fought the law and the law won"
and in 1966, a year before Operation Chaos kicked into gear, he was found
with his stomach full of gasoline, and his body had been set aflame in
his car. It had been ruled a suicide, but that's impossible as indicated
by the severe beating he took before his death. It's certain he was murdered.
Rock & Roll had created waves socially, and certain parts wanted nothing
to do with Rock & Roll and resented its existence. This goes all the
way back to Nazi Germany when the Nazis descended upon the Swing kids
and assassinated musicians for partaking in what the Nazis called "nigger
kike music." Something of this reactionary attitude survived in the
United States, especially during the Vietnam War, when Rock & Roll
became synonymous with politics. Operation Chaos was created in 1967 and
exposed in 1970 in several newspapers, along with the COINTELPRO. Both
were forced to burrow deeper and they continued to survive. COINTELPRO
is still with us and so is Operation Chaos but they're not known to the
public. Should they be exposed again, they'll simply fire some personnel
and burrow down again.

SECONDS: Can we bring
this up to date?

CONSTANTINE: I mentioned
Michael Hutchence and according to Rolling Stone, Hutchence was found
with a broken hand, bruises and lacerations over his body, a split lip
and yet somehow he contrived to hang himself with a belt from a doorway.
It seems to me it's impossible to hang yourself with one broken hand.

SECONDS: Why was he targeted?

CONSTANTINE: What could
the C.I.A. have against a man like Michael Hutchence? Well, he was involved
in a documentary about East Timor, which was essentially a C.I.A. machination
that ended in a hundred thousand deaths including some American reporters.
The reporters had to be murdered first so that word of the slaughter wouldn't
leak out. They managed to keep it under wraps for many years and Michael
Hutchence was about to release a documentary on it. It's possible there
were other motives for his murder.

SECONDS: Is there Mafia
involvement in these assassinations?

CONSTANTINE: I'm sure
you've heard of Operation Underworld during World War Two in which military
intelligence forged an alliance with the Mafia in order to fight Mussolini.
After the war, the C.I.A. held on to some of the key Mafia assets, including
Meyer Lansky. Sam Giancana said the C.I.A. is one side of the coin, the
Mafia is the other. They're often used in political assassinations, like
the killing of John Kennedy and others and when Operation Chaos was born,
the C.I.A. and the Mafia coordinated activities because the Mafia wanted
a piece of the music business and the C.I.A. wanted to do away with politics
in popular music — so they had an incentive to join forces.

SECONDS: What about your
other books, Psychic Dictatorship In The U.S.A. and Virtual Government?

CONSTANTINE: Psychic
Dictatorship covers various subjects but the theme is mind control, a
subject I delve into further in Virtual Government. Psychic Dictatorship
talks about everything from the dangers of Nutrasweet to black bag operations
of the C.I.A. to brain telemetry and electronic harassment. Virtual Government
deals specifically with mind control, trauma-based programming, killings
in the postal system, and so-called "psychic warfare," which
was a front for mind control experimentation.

SECONDS: John Alexander
has a hook on psychic warfare

CONSTANTINE: My nemesis,
John Alexander, has been very much an advocate of electronic weapons,
and as far as I'm concerned, is at the core of covert operations.